This semester Harvard welcomed 5 new girls coaches to guide crew, swimming and diving, Nordic snowboarding, ice hockey, and softball. The 5 girls obtained collectively earlier this month in between conferences on the Murr Heart to debate their paths to Harvard, teaching philosophies and objectives, points dealing with girls athletes right this moment, Title IX’s legacy, and sports activities as a catalyst for social change.

Amanda Kulik
Costin Household Head Coach for Harvard Girls’s Swimming and Diving

“I’ve at all times approached teaching from a educating lens,” mentioned Kulik, who has coached right here in varied roles since 2013. “It’s considering of it like a curriculum: What do we wish on the finish? … We’re actually right here to deliver pleasure, to assist these scholar athletes uncover, be taught, and develop to be their greatest selves, not simply right here at Harvard, however into the following section of life.”

About Title IX, she mentioned, “I believe so much about my mother,” a bodily training teacher. “I need to honor her efforts and maintain the legacy of girls’s management in sports activities transferring ahead.”

That is significantly related, she mentioned, as younger individuals face problems with racial justice, local weather change, and psychological well being in a world nonetheless recovering from the pandemic. “Sport is a spot the place social change can begin.”

Sam Benzing
Paul J. Finnegan Household Head Coach for Nordic Snowboarding

Benzing described her teaching method as holistic — “ each the bodily and psychological side of well-being and efficiency.”

The Idaho native obtained an in-depth take a look at the problems dealing with girls — and the significance of mentoring — whereas snowboarding on the Faculty of St. Scholastica in Duluth, Minnesota. Her coach linked her with the Tucker Heart for Analysis on Women & Girls in Sport, the place she accomplished a gender fairness internship adopted by a Tara VanDerveer Fellowship via the Girls’s Sports activities Basis. Now, with assistant coach Hannah Halvorsen, she has the one all-women Nordic ski employees within the NCAA on the Division I degree.

Title IX, Benzing famous, had some sudden penalties, together with a lower within the variety of girls coaches after its passage. “We had an growth of athletic alternatives for girls, and male coaches stuffed the teaching roles. We’re nonetheless coping with the consequences of that right this moment,” she mentioned.

Change could also be sluggish, however “it’s coming,” she pressured, citing analysis exhibiting a 2 % improve in girls head coaches at choose Division I establishments over the previous two years.

Laura Bellamy ’13
Landry Household Head Coach for Girls’s Ice Hockey

In the present day’s student-athletes “are a lot extra knowledgeable than we had been, which causes them to ask actually good questions,” mentioned Bellamy. “They’re actually powerful and resilient, they usually can deal with suggestions, however they require communication.”

Bellamy isn’t solely an alumna, she is among the greatest hockey goaltenders within the girls’s workforce’s 45-year historical past. That have kinds the muse of what she hopes to instill in her student-athletes.

“It will be nice if we will have skilled girls’s hockey gamers come out of Harvard and I believe we’ll,” mentioned Bellamy. “However then what’s subsequent for them? I need to assist them determine that out whereas they’re right here.”

Jenny Rohn
Harvard softball head coach

“Harvard college students, basically, at all times need to know why,” mentioned Rohn. For her, meaning “breaking down our teaching to essentially have a solution for why we’re doing what we’re doing.”

“They’re very interested by how that is going to assist, and perhaps a bit of cautious about stepping exterior of their consolation zone. However we encourage them to. If you step exterior your consolation zone, that’s once you’re going to develop and that’s once you’re going to turn into a greater model of your self.”

Rohn started as a volunteer assistant throughout the 2016 season, transferring as much as second assistant two years later, after which lead assistant coach in 2021. “I truly owned each single position within the Harvard softball program,” mentioned Rohn. After a short return to her alma mater, Western Michigan, she answered Harvard’s name. “The mannequin of growing scholar athletes right here is strictly what I’m obsessed with and what I stay to do.”

Claire Ochal
The Buddies of Radcliffe Rowing Head Coach for Girls’s Heavyweight Crew

Ochal, a local of North Studying, Massachusetts, fell in love along with her sport in school, rowing on the Charles River for Boston College earlier than starting her personal teaching profession at Wayland-Weston Excessive Faculty. She then spent 5 years constructing Syracuse College’s workforce as affiliate head coach and recruiting coordinator.

As “the tallest one in all my pals,” the coach appears ahead to “working with girls and serving to them to be robust, empowered, and assured — and to not draw back from being the tallest particular person within the room.”